Adventures in Software

Tag Archives: AACS

I missed posting about a lot of events in the past few weeks. It's unfortunate, because there were some great events, including Kirsten Schwark's talk on "Why Groovy" at the Detroit JUG this past Wednesday.

But, it's time to look forward. Today, SRT is hosting lightning talks from 3:30-5. Held at our office at 206 S. Fifth, Suite 200, this event is open to the public and free. We love it when other geeks come in and talk for 5 minutes about things that they're doing. It keeps us all up to date!

Next week is a slow week, but there are some things coming up in December that look interesting and useful:

December 3: Eclipse DemoCamp, Compuware, 6 pm. Free. There will be a presentation about building applications on top of the Eclipse OSGi framework, demos of products / plug-ins built on the framework and after the presentations, people will head over to the Detroit HardRock Cafe. The Detroit HardRock Cafe is located on the first floor of the Compuware building. There will be plenty of free parking and security at Compuware.

The Ann Arbor Computer Society also meets on December 3 at 6 pm. Topic is still TBD, but I hear rumors that people may try out parts of their CodeMash talks, to get input from the AACS audience. That will probably be quite fun and interesting. And of course, this is also free (pizza supplied by AACS). Meeting will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave., Suite 200.

On Thursday, December 4, the Michigan Python User Group meets at 7 pm. The MichiPUG group negotiates its meeting topics in the week prior to the event on its google group, and they never disappoint. Join them at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200. Their meeting is free as well.

On Thursday, December 18, ArbCamp resurfaces … as a BarCamp! You can read more about this event in detail at http://tinyurl.com/6eda4s. This article is not only about the ArbCamp event, but it's a great look at building and growing the tech community in Ann Arbor. I think that this is going to be a fabulous event, and people will not want to leave. It starts at 6 pm on the 18th (I'm trying to figure out how I can get there … have to figure out how to break it to my very understanding husband).

On Wednesday, December 10, the Ann Arbor .NET Development Group will host Jason Follas, speaking on Spatial Data 2008. The meeting will be at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200 at 6 pm. Donations taken for pizza. More details at http://aadnd.org.

On Wednesday, December 17, the Great Lakes Area .NET user group meets at 6 pm at Microsoft's office in Southfield, 1000 Town Center Drive, Suite 1930, Southfield, MI. I'm not sure what the topic is, but keep an eye on http://migang.org

And, don't forget to sign up for CodeMash (January 7-9 in Sandusky, OH). The early bird deadline is November 29! We have an amazing group of speakers lined up, including Mads Torgerson, Venkat Subramaniam, Jesse Liberty, Bill Wagner, David Laribee, Chris Adamson, Jim Weirich, Joe O'Brien, Andrew Glover, Ed Vielmetti and many many more. Whether you're looking for a talk on Ruby or Python, Silverlight or Multithreaded programming, User Experience or Continuous Integration, CodeMash has something for you. Wondering about Erlang? We have talks. IPhone development? I'm VERY excited about this event.

So, this Tech Events in Ann Arbor post for the week of September 22 finds yours truly speaking at the Ann Arbor Java User Group on Tuesday, September 23 at 6:30. The meeting will be held at Washtenaw Community College in room BE270. I'll be talking about "Scala for Java Programmers". What CAN you do with this language? And why do you care? Is it a Java replacement? We'll explore some of the corners of the functional aspects of Scala, but object-oriented programmers will feel quite at home in this talk. Please come. I would love your feedback on the language (and on the talk).

On Friday join SRT for lightning talks, from 3:30-5. As always, lightning talks are open to all. Come to do a 5 minute talk or to listen!

Next week, the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting will feature Bill Heitzeg discussing JBoss and .NET. AACS meetings are free and open to the public. AACS sponsors pizza and soft drinks. Members qualify for door prizes.

The Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting tonight (Wednesday, September 3) will be an open spaces format, which will enable the attendees to customize the meeting to the topics that they want to discuss. Arrive with ideas about things that you want to talk about, and post them during the organizational period (early part of the meeting). Then, break into small groups and discuss. The meeting will start at 6:00, and is open to everyone. You do not need to be a member of AACS to attend OR to eat the pizza provided by the organization. You do need to be a member ($20/year) to qualify for door prizes.

Tonight's AACS meeting is a nice lead-in to this weekend's Agile Summer Camp, where developers will gather together at Brighton Recreation Area from Friday September 5 through Sunday September 7 to discuss agile software development in a low-tech (no electricity) open spaces environment. Camp if you want (there are 2 bunkhouses) or go home and come back each day. But register soon!

Late breaking news … once again the deep network of Ann Arbor Computer Society members has come through with an interesting talk.

The AACS program chair (Jay Wren) has just let me know that Chris Sellers will speak on Amazon EC2 at the AACS meeting on Wednesday, July 2. The meeting will start at 6 pm, and as always, is free and open to everyone. AACS meets at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service that allows you to run your application on Amazon's servers, where you pay for the capacity of the computing resources that you use.

Yes, it's the first week of the month again. The Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting is tomorrow night, April 2, at 6 pm. Jay Wren will be speaking on the Boo Programming Language and DSLs (Domain Specific Languages). Boo is a statically typed language that runs on the CLR. It has Python-inspired syntax.

AACS meetings are free and open to the public. Pizza will be provided. Meeting will be held at SRT Solutions' offices, at 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200. That's at the corner of Fifth Ave and Liberty, just above the Linux Box. Take the elevator to 2R or come up the stairs and wind around to the right side of the elevator.

On Thursday April 3 at 7:00 pm, the Michigan Python User Group will meet to discuss EasyExtend, which allows you to extend Python syntax. New documentation tools may be discussed as well. Like AACS, the MichiPUG meetings are free and open to the public, and held at SRT Solutions. Pizza will NOT be served, but people often go out after the meeting.

Next week, on Monday, April 7, there is a Flex Camp in Cleveland, Ohio. Go to http://flexcampcleveland.com/ for registration and more information. Looks like a fun and interesting event.

On Wednesday, April 9, the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer Group will meet, at SRT Solutions. Bill Wagner will be talking about how to make good use of the new releases in Visual Studio 2008. Meeting is free, starts at 6, is at SRT, and yes, there will be pizza.

Joe O'Brien is braving the weather, en route from Columbus up to Ann Arbor for tonight's Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting. Ann Arbor is getting some ice, but evidently the rest of the area seems to be getting snow.

If you're already in Ann Arbor, definitely stop by. I'm, sadly, not going to be able to make it since we got hit pretty hard with snow and ice at my house and I'm pretty much iced in. Having heard Joe speak several times, I'm very disappointed to be missing his talk, and I hope that someone will blog about it!

The meeting is at 6 pm, at 206 S. Fifth, Suite 200, Ann Arbor. AACS provides pizza, free of charge, to all attendees. Meetings are free and open to the public, but only members ($20/year) qualify for door prizes.

We had a discussion at the office this afternoon that centered around how to attract a younger group of people to the computer user group meetings. We got several suggestions out of this, but are looking for more ideas.

First of all, WHY do we want to attract a younger crowd? Well, the average age of the groups (Ann Arbor Computer Society, Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer Group, Ann Arbor Java User Group, Michigan Python User Group) is … well … "experienced". We could all benefit from a younger perspective, and the groups could use an infusion of new members. Makes sense to tap the untapped market. Winston Tsang tells me that the Ruby User Group is pretty young, and that's interesting. What are they doing differently, except that it's Ruby? Well, for one thing, the meeting is held on campus. That's interesting, because I initially shyed away from AACS when meetings were held on campus because I thought that it was a student group (it wasn't). I wonder if that would make a difference?

The programming has been pretty "hip" in recent years, and diverse. AADND has been focusing on .NET content, which has left AACS to mainly do "other than .NET". That makes sense.

This month's AACS topic is Domain Specific Languages in Ruby. I think that might attract a younger crowd but I'm not sure. We'll see. Oh yes, and AACS provides free pizza to all attendees, as well.

If you know anyone under the age of 30 that isn't in the habit of attending the user group meetings, can you reach out and explain what they are? Let them know that if they are looking for a job, want to learn more about the industry and/or the Ann Arbor area, or simply want to hang out with other techies for the night, the user groups are a good way to accomplish that. The meeting is at 6 pm.

Hopefully we'll have a big crowd on Wednesday for Joe's talk. And if you can't make it on Wednesday (ahem, or even if you can!), Thursday's MichiPUG (Python user group) meeting will be great as well. The Thursday meeting is at 7 pm.

Joe O'Brien, of the Columbus Ruby Brigade and EdgeCase, will be in Ann Arbor this week. He's presenting a talk at the Ann Arbor Computer Society – "Domain Specific Languages: Molding Ruby". A summary appears below.

"Ever wondered what all the fuss is about when it comes to DSL's and Ruby? It seems to be all we hear about. This talk will peel away the onion and look at what it is about Ruby that makes it the perfect candidate for creating your own languages. I will show you, through examples, how you can create your own languages without the need for compilers and parsers. We will also cover some real world examples in areas of Banking and Medicine where DSL's have been applied."

Joe spoke at AACS about a year ago, and I was lucky enough to attend. His talks are always interesting. If you can attend, I definitely recommend it.

All of the above events are being held at the SRT offices, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200, Ann Arbor (corner of Fifth and Washington, entrance from Fifth). Take the elevator to 2R or wind around to the left from the stairwell.

P.S. And if you're not interested in Leopard, then there's an interesting non-computer related talk going on in Ypsilanti at the Corner Brewery regarding Solar Power and Optics, on Wednesday November 7, from 7-9!